Sundar Narayanan is the Chief People Officer for Virtusa, leading HR, diversity programs, and employee success.
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A few weeks ago, I had an issue with my phone where I was unable to receive text messages. After 20 minutes of searching online and airing my frustrations, my 12-year-old son said the infamous phrase "let me see." Reluctantly, I handed over my phone and waited for him to run into the same dead ends I found myself in. But we've all been there before — he tossed it back with a simple "fixed."
While this is a basic example — not a complex IT challenge or nuanced business issue — it's clear that younger generations develop foundational technology knowledge and skills from a young age. As my son handed my phone back, I realized that with the proper training, there's an enormous pool of potential experts around the world — they just don't know it yet. With the appropriate training and opportunities to put their new skills to use, we can reshape how we think about inspiring the future workforce.
Building a high-performing team requires a combination of skills, but those skills are constantly evolving. The only way to remain relevant and get out in front from a skills- and capability-based perspective is to get serious about training and commit to it for the future. Training isn't an annual exercise or quarterly assessment. It needs to be part of your company's core values and reinforced daily — at all levels of an organization.
While compensation is a significant factor for job candidates, getting into bidding wars over top talent isn't sustainable for most. In my experience, employees that are trained and developed can take on higher-value work, which usually comes with higher wages. But before we get into compensation, first you need to find candidates, which has become increasingly harder to do. But are we looking in the right places?
We need to widen our hiring lenses. Over the past few years, my company started paying attention to other disciplines, skills and demographics. This year, close to 20% of our entry-level hires were from non-engineering backgrounds, and we are looking to increase that number in 2022.
Traditional education is and will remain important, but consider looking at additional factors when looking for new hires:
• Do they have a track record for embracing learning and training?
• Are they digital problem solvers?
• Are they inquisitive?
Ultimately, employees are people, so training programs need to appeal to our innate human instincts and needs. Taking this into consideration, there are four critical principles to prioritize when building training programs for the future workforce:
1. Promote Discovery
Foster an environment that encourages people to reflect and step out of their comfort zones to discover their true capabilities.
2. Spark Curiosity
Create programs where people engage with a larger community of peers with diverse backgrounds. Develop an ecosystem for mutual exchange, understanding and respect, as this helps everyone learn from others' experience and expertise.
3. Unleash Potential
Collaborating with colleagues across technology, sales, marketing, finance, HR and other areas allows employees to identify challenges that range from strategic to operational. This allows them to work on projects to drive change and transformation.
4. Encourage Self-Transformation
Equipped with self-awareness and new skills, employees are empowered to take risks and contribute significantly to the company's future. Give them a chance to lead by example and foster a culture of innovation and change across the organization. Future leaders — and many current leaders today — will likely never stop self-transformation.
When building a vision for the future workforce, we need to inspire our people to unlock their true potential and never stop learning (or teaching). Successful programs and companies will ensure that training programs create a unique and remarkable experience, enable transformation at a deeper level and enhance their capacity.
To serve our clients effectively and consistently, we need to transform ourselves first. The traditional model of HR is long gone, and our role has evolved to focus on employee success. Our people are pivotal to our transformation journey, so we need to build and develop teams with the right combination of skills, experience and willingness to evolve and transform.
We hold the future in our hands, and training can pave the way to innovation and success. An employee's capacity to learn new skills and competencies and develop leadership capabilities can be expanded by challenging their limits and giving them a chance to prove themselves. In return, you build a highly motivated and effective workforce for the future. Who knows, maybe we should start considering my son for a future role.
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